1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to methods for indexing and searching hardcopy documents, and more particularly to a method and apparatus for electronically indexing data elements in a hardcopy book or document and thereby searching and locating a particular data element in the hardcopy book or document.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Although electronic available books, such as available online, may have extensive indexing features when read via a computing device, unfortunately, hardcopy documents have not benefitted from sophisticated indexing and searching capability.
Conventionally, hardcopy documents, typically a book, are searched to find information they contain by using a table of contents or index, if available, and manually searching all data elements in the hardcopy document. Many kinds of books, for example novels, may not include an index or table of contents, and others, such as computer language reference books, are written fairly rapidly and include an index section and a table of contents section that are often not very complete.
Since the index typically is not complete, if one needs to look up something in the hardcopy document or book, the indexing mechanism in the back of the book may not be very helpful. Full text indexing, for example, is too big to include with the book. A complete index may require as much as an additional one third of the size of an associated book if printed along with the book. So readers in the past have had to accept this problem and rely on a subset of a full index in a book to assist in searching the book in order to keep the size of the hardcopy document or book to a commercially acceptable volume.
Other hardcopy documents, such as electrical drawings and maps, include data elements other than text, such as graphics, and suffer from a similar disadvantage of not being fully indexed and their data elements are not easily located or searched for. For example, a person may wish to locate a specific transistor in a complex circuit depicted in an electrical drawing or blueprint. Regrettably, the person would have to exhaustively search all data elements in the electrical drawing to locate the transistor without the benefit of an indexed search. It has been commercially impractical to provide a complete hardcopy index.
Additionally, since users in the past have only been able to manually search hardcopy documents by reading the limited index tables printed in the hardcopy document, the type of manual searching is limited typically to a linear alphabetical search of an index table. It is unfortunate that neither more complete searching nor more complex searching methods are available to hardcopy readers. For example, prior to the present invention it would have been impracticable for a reader of a hardcopy document to engage in complex boolean searching of multiple data elements in a hardcopy document.
Hardcopy documents, however, have distinct advantages. They are pleasant to read, easy to annotate, viewing distance and angle can be easily adjusted, they do not require network connectivity or depend on network speed, they are mobile, and so on. Hardcopy books, even in technical areas, will be popular for a long time.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method and apparatus to eliminate those specific disadvantages of the prior art as discussed above, and particularly to significantly enhance the ability of a person to index search a hardcopy document.